And still the visions unfurled. With every step her astonishment grew at the variety of places and objects the Seerkind had saved from the conflagration. The Fugue was not, as she’d anticipated, simply a collection of haunted groves and thickets. Holiness was a far more democratic condition; it informed fragments of every kind: intimate and momentous, natural and artificial. Each corner and niche had its own peculiar mode of rapture.

The circumstances of their preservation meant that most of these fragments had been torn from their context like pages from a book. Their edges were still raw with the violence of that removal, and the haphazard way they’d been thrown together, only made their disunity seem more acute. But there were compensations. The very disparity of the pieces – the way the domestic abutted the public, the commonplace the fabulous – created fresh conundrums, hints of new stories that these hitherto unconnected pages might tell.

Sometimes the journey showed them collisions of elements so unlikely they defied any attempt to synthesize them. Dogs grazing beside a tomb, from fractured lid of which rose a fountain of fire that ran like water; a window set in the ground, its curtains billowing skyward on a breeze that carried the sound of the sea. These riddles, defying her power of explanation, marked her profoundly. There was nothing here that she hadn’t seen before – dogs, tombs, windows, fire – but in this flux she found them reinvented, their magic made again before her eyes.

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